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Violence is inherently physical. It is the forceful physical violation of one’s person or property. Trying to expand the definition of “violence” beyond this sc

by SllX 7y ago

Violence is inherently physical. It is the forceful physical violation of one’s person or property. Trying to expand the definition of “violence” beyond this scope dilutes its meaning beyond recognition and usefulness. However, I will agree it is harmful when a supplier terminates its services, particularly so if you were dependent on that supplier. People make their own choices about who to do business with and how to go about their business, but let’s not pretend that YouTube is anything it isn’t. The lesson to take away here isn’t that YouTube should be regulated like some kind of utility and to take away their ability to terminate relations with producers, but that you shouldn’t be so thoroughly dependent on one supplier for your business that it is financially ruinous to lose their services. I’m not saying there’s no case to be made for YouTube to improve their policies and processes to provide more due process than they do now, but that’s a debate that should be happening between YouTube and the people that use YouTube to distribute their work. They’re not employees, they’re clients, effectively small businesses and a number of the smarter ones already know the danger of depending on YouTube as their sole source of income and have worked to diversify.

JorgeGT 7y ago
> It is the forceful physical violation of one’s person or property. But not all property is physical. And increasingly, our property is just data located in somebody's servers: your Dropbox contents, your Steam games, the money in your online bank account.
- SllX 7y ago
  I would argue it is physical insofar as it has to exist on something tangible, whether that’s an aggregated bank ledger or a server somewhere or as backups on disks that you own, but your point is taken so I’ll address the concerns you raised. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your perspective, but unfortunately from my perspective, in the case of Steam games and software, that is largely covered: you paid for licenses to play games rather than licenses, but some of it is DRM-free so you can take backups. That money in the bank account is yours, unless seized through a legal process, which can happen and you can challenge it if it does. Everything else, Dropbox, Google Photos, iCloud, emails, whatever, you should have your own backups. You should have them not just for legal reasons or because your service providers might terminate their services to you, but because they might actually lose your data. You have some rights to that data, but none of the businesses involved in hosting it are compelled to do business with you specifically, and aren’t required to keep it anymore than the law compels them to.
  - JorgeGT 7y ago
    > That money in the bank account is yours, unless seized through a legal process. And this is because through the centuries we have enacted enough laws to deter private banking companies from messing with our money. If left to their own devices, we would have DRM-ed money, random service terminations, unexplained money loses, etc. We just need to extend these rights and safeties to other spheres of our digital property through the use of law and its enforcement.
    - SllX 7y ago
      Yes, but a bank can still terminate its business with you. It just has to return your money to you. Now if you’re suggesting we have a law that companies which hold our data have to return our data when they terminate their business relationship with us, I wouldn’t necessarily disagree.
      - JorgeGT 7y ago
        The legal obligations of a bank towards its clients generally extend way beyond your example, depending on the country, but yes, returning the client belongings upon termination of the relationship should be a basic right mandated by law. I think it is profoundly absurd that we are renouncing hard-fought consumer rights just because business is now being conducted electronically. If the letter of the law no longer matches the spirit, we should update the letter, not lose the spirit.
        SllX 7y ago
        I think we agree more than we disagree. Thank you for your time.
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  Most of these things aren't really property. And even for banks, you partially forfeit your property rights when deciding to keep your money there...
soulofmischief 7y ago
You're honing in on a specific definition of violence, ignoring its historic colloquial usages. People make their own choices about who to do business with and how to go about their business More attempts to pin the narrative as a business transaction while ignoring the larger implications of phenomena such as deplatformization in public forums operated by unscrupulous corporations who control access to their audiences of millions. The lesson to take away here isn’t that YouTube should be regulated like some kind of utility and to take away their ability to terminate relations with producers, but that you shouldn’t be so thoroughly dependent on one supplier for your business that it is financially ruinous to lose their services. Try applying that same logic to someone who is stuck in an abusive relationship, deprived of the resources needed to secure their financial and emotional independence. We shouldn't regulate domestic abuse, because people should not be so thoroughly dependent on one person for their welfare. It's their choice. Information is the currency of modern society. In a two-decade span we've allowed extreme centralization and gatekeeping of digital information, placing control of its flow into the hands of a dozen or two corporations. Twenty years ago, decentralization was alive and well and if a community of 50-100 people had a hardass for an admin, that was fine, because there were often plenty of other communities of similar caliber elsewhere for popular topics. Now we have things like reddit. "Decentralized", but communities are constantly plagued by misguided, ill-informed decisions handed down from the guy upstairs. Entire communities of thousands of people are destroyed overnight. But where else will they go? No one registers for forums anymore, reddit is in the top 20 most popular websites in the world with 300 million users. That's an entire country. YouTube shares a similar tale. Whether you would like to admit it or not, what these large companies in positions of power are doing today is the equivalent of mass censorship, restriction of speech, and ideological persecution. And these platforms often support user-created censorship as well.
- SllX 7y ago
  I’m sorry you had that experience on Facebook. I wish I could tell you that kind of thing is surprising or unexpected, but unfortunately it isn’t either of those things these days. I hope you’re doing alright and that you’re able to put it behind you. As for violence, I standby what is the more useful and regular definition. There may be useful non-physical extensions in colloquial usage, but the word itself has connotations of a physical forcefulness that nothing else really has. * More attempts to pin the narrative as a business transaction while ignoring the larger implications of phenomena such as deplatformization in public forums operated by unscrupulous corporations who control access to their audiences of millions.* I don’t have to pin the narrative as such, that is exactly what this is: a transactional relationship between unscrupulous corporations and small businesses. Both have equal right to make decisions as to who they do business with. * Information is the currency of modern society. In a two-decade span we've allowed extreme centralization and gatekeeping of digital information, placing control of its flow into the hands of a dozen or two corporations.* Information has always been an asset in any society. What’s changed is that we can aggregate it at a larger scale than ever before, extract more value than ever before and have many more applications for it than ever before. Let’s say there are a dozen or two companies that have largely centralized it. That in itself is a bit of an oxymoron if there’s as many as a dozen, or two dozen participating in the trade. However, there are far far more companies trading in the information market than that! To bring this back to social media: no one has yet to make a compelling case to me that this market is in fact centralized. You may be able to make this case in a country by country basis. You may be able to make the case that of the various subtypes of social media companies, there’s maybe one that matters in each category. Social media as a global market has never been centralized, and is decreasingly so every passing year. Facebook having a few billion users hardly matters when many of them are also active users of Reddit, Twitter, WeChat, LINE, Slack, LinkedIn, and so on and so forth. You can setup a community today and host it yourself using basic web tools or something like Mastodon. Is deplatforming a form of mass censorship? Absolutely it is! Can you make a moral case against it? Absolutely! Can you also make a moral case for it? Again, absolutely! Does it hurt the people it targets socially and/or economically? In many cases, yes. It’s not the government making those decisions though, which is an important distinction to make. Government censorship comes with the long arm of the law attached, which ends with the guy in the navy blue uniform with the gun. Corporate censorship is inconvenient, but it’s not prison. I think social media is going to continue to exist, continue to have a business case, and continue to increase the total number of communities. In a couple decades, choosing a platform might be like choosing a pub: you evaluate who the maintainer is, what the community is oriented around and what are their values. Can you post pictures? What kind? Can you also post little clips timed to music? Will the messages expire? We already see this to some degree today with group chats on different platforms. The platforms have their own rules as to what can be posted, as well as their own technical limitations, but they’re a semi-private space to cordon off a subset of the larger platform and give the members a place to exchange messages and data.
AsyncAwait 7y ago
Say there are sanctions imposed on a country by the U.S. that make it near impossible to import the necessary mediacations for cancer patients, as a result of which, some of them die. I'd say calling that 'economic violence' is pretty accurate.
- SllX 7y ago
  A trade sanction is intended as a form of physical violence backed up by physical force. You could call it economic violence, I would just call it violence.
  - AsyncAwait 7y ago
    Am glad to hear that, I'd actually agree with you, but many wouldn't because of that thin layer of 'we didn't technically use the military to accomplish this', but rather the global financial system, even if the outcome is basically the same
    - SllX 7y ago
      They might not, but for a sanction to be applied properly, you need to apply violence somewhere within the enforcement process. Take the sanctions against Iran for example. Huawei violated these sanctions and this directly led to Meng Wanzhou’s arrest in Canada and her bring charged in the United States. It would appear the extradition hearings are still going on with the trial set to start this month and it might go as long as October.
  - Double_Cast 7y ago
    I see this as analogous to saying > Numbers are inherently binary. You could call 93 "a decimal number", but I would just call it "a number". There's no point in having the term "decimal" since the tech stack is all just "(binary) numbers" beneath layers of indirection. Surely you see the usefulness in assigning each layer of indirection a unique qualifier?

by SllX 7y ago

JorgeGT 7y ago

> It is the forceful physical violation of one’s person or property. But not all property is physical. And increasingly, our property is just data located in somebody's servers: your Dropbox contents, your Steam games, the money in your online bank account.

SllX 7y ago
I would argue it is physical insofar as it has to exist on something tangible, whether that’s an aggregated bank ledger or a server somewhere or as backups on disks that you own, but your point is taken so I’ll address the concerns you raised. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your perspective, but unfortunately from my perspective, in the case of Steam games and software, that is largely covered: you paid for licenses to play games rather than licenses, but some of it is DRM-free so you can take backups. That money in the bank account is yours, unless seized through a legal process, which can happen and you can challenge it if it does. Everything else, Dropbox, Google Photos, iCloud, emails, whatever, you should have your own backups. You should have them not just for legal reasons or because your service providers might terminate their services to you, but because they might actually lose your data. You have some rights to that data, but none of the businesses involved in hosting it are compelled to do business with you specifically, and aren’t required to keep it anymore than the law compels them to.
- JorgeGT 7y ago
  > That money in the bank account is yours, unless seized through a legal process. And this is because through the centuries we have enacted enough laws to deter private banking companies from messing with our money. If left to their own devices, we would have DRM-ed money, random service terminations, unexplained money loses, etc. We just need to extend these rights and safeties to other spheres of our digital property through the use of law and its enforcement.
  - SllX 7y ago
    Yes, but a bank can still terminate its business with you. It just has to return your money to you. Now if you’re suggesting we have a law that companies which hold our data have to return our data when they terminate their business relationship with us, I wouldn’t necessarily disagree.
    - JorgeGT 7y ago
      The legal obligations of a bank towards its clients generally extend way beyond your example, depending on the country, but yes, returning the client belongings upon termination of the relationship should be a basic right mandated by law. I think it is profoundly absurd that we are renouncing hard-fought consumer rights just because business is now being conducted electronically. If the letter of the law no longer matches the spirit, we should update the letter, not lose the spirit.
      - SllX 7y ago
        I think we agree more than we disagree. Thank you for your time.
BlueTemplar 7y ago
Most of these things aren't really property. And even for banks, you partially forfeit your property rights when deciding to keep your money there...

soulofmischief 7y ago

You're honing in on a specific definition of violence, ignoring its historic colloquial usages. People make their own choices about who to do business with and how to go about their business More attempts to pin the narrative as a business transaction while ignoring the larger implications of phenomena such as deplatformization in public forums operated by unscrupulous corporations who control access to their audiences of millions. The lesson to take away here isn’t that YouTube should be regulated like some kind of utility and to take away their ability to terminate relations with producers, but that you shouldn’t be so thoroughly dependent on one supplier for your business that it is financially ruinous to lose their services. Try applying that same logic to someone who is stuck in an abusive relationship, deprived of the resources needed to secure their financial and emotional independence. We shouldn't regulate domestic abuse, because people should not be so thoroughly dependent on one person for their welfare. It's their choice. Information is the currency of modern society. In a two-decade span we've allowed extreme centralization and gatekeeping of digital information, placing control of its flow into the hands of a dozen or two corporations. Twenty years ago, decentralization was alive and well and if a community of 50-100 people had a hardass for an admin, that was fine, because there were often plenty of other communities of similar caliber elsewhere for popular topics. Now we have things like reddit. "Decentralized", but communities are constantly plagued by misguided, ill-informed decisions handed down from the guy upstairs. Entire communities of thousands of people are destroyed overnight. But where else will they go? No one registers for forums anymore, reddit is in the top 20 most popular websites in the world with 300 million users. That's an entire country. YouTube shares a similar tale. Whether you would like to admit it or not, what these large companies in positions of power are doing today is the equivalent of mass censorship, restriction of speech, and ideological persecution. And these platforms often support user-created censorship as well.

SllX 7y ago
I’m sorry you had that experience on Facebook. I wish I could tell you that kind of thing is surprising or unexpected, but unfortunately it isn’t either of those things these days. I hope you’re doing alright and that you’re able to put it behind you. As for violence, I standby what is the more useful and regular definition. There may be useful non-physical extensions in colloquial usage, but the word itself has connotations of a physical forcefulness that nothing else really has. * More attempts to pin the narrative as a business transaction while ignoring the larger implications of phenomena such as deplatformization in public forums operated by unscrupulous corporations who control access to their audiences of millions.* I don’t have to pin the narrative as such, that is exactly what this is: a transactional relationship between unscrupulous corporations and small businesses. Both have equal right to make decisions as to who they do business with. * Information is the currency of modern society. In a two-decade span we've allowed extreme centralization and gatekeeping of digital information, placing control of its flow into the hands of a dozen or two corporations.* Information has always been an asset in any society. What’s changed is that we can aggregate it at a larger scale than ever before, extract more value than ever before and have many more applications for it than ever before. Let’s say there are a dozen or two companies that have largely centralized it. That in itself is a bit of an oxymoron if there’s as many as a dozen, or two dozen participating in the trade. However, there are far far more companies trading in the information market than that! To bring this back to social media: no one has yet to make a compelling case to me that this market is in fact centralized. You may be able to make this case in a country by country basis. You may be able to make the case that of the various subtypes of social media companies, there’s maybe one that matters in each category. Social media as a global market has never been centralized, and is decreasingly so every passing year. Facebook having a few billion users hardly matters when many of them are also active users of Reddit, Twitter, WeChat, LINE, Slack, LinkedIn, and so on and so forth. You can setup a community today and host it yourself using basic web tools or something like Mastodon. Is deplatforming a form of mass censorship? Absolutely it is! Can you make a moral case against it? Absolutely! Can you also make a moral case for it? Again, absolutely! Does it hurt the people it targets socially and/or economically? In many cases, yes. It’s not the government making those decisions though, which is an important distinction to make. Government censorship comes with the long arm of the law attached, which ends with the guy in the navy blue uniform with the gun. Corporate censorship is inconvenient, but it’s not prison. I think social media is going to continue to exist, continue to have a business case, and continue to increase the total number of communities. In a couple decades, choosing a platform might be like choosing a pub: you evaluate who the maintainer is, what the community is oriented around and what are their values. Can you post pictures? What kind? Can you also post little clips timed to music? Will the messages expire? We already see this to some degree today with group chats on different platforms. The platforms have their own rules as to what can be posted, as well as their own technical limitations, but they’re a semi-private space to cordon off a subset of the larger platform and give the members a place to exchange messages and data.

AsyncAwait 7y ago

Say there are sanctions imposed on a country by the U.S. that make it near impossible to import the necessary mediacations for cancer patients, as a result of which, some of them die. I'd say calling that 'economic violence' is pretty accurate.

SllX 7y ago
A trade sanction is intended as a form of physical violence backed up by physical force. You could call it economic violence, I would just call it violence.
- AsyncAwait 7y ago
  Am glad to hear that, I'd actually agree with you, but many wouldn't because of that thin layer of 'we didn't technically use the military to accomplish this', but rather the global financial system, even if the outcome is basically the same
  - SllX 7y ago
    They might not, but for a sanction to be applied properly, you need to apply violence somewhere within the enforcement process. Take the sanctions against Iran for example. Huawei violated these sanctions and this directly led to Meng Wanzhou’s arrest in Canada and her bring charged in the United States. It would appear the extradition hearings are still going on with the trial set to start this month and it might go as long as October.
- Double_Cast 7y ago
  I see this as analogous to saying > Numbers are inherently binary. You could call 93 "a decimal number", but I would just call it "a number". There's no point in having the term "decimal" since the tech stack is all just "(binary) numbers" beneath layers of indirection. Surely you see the usefulness in assigning each layer of indirection a unique qualifier?